Worldwide Information Growth Faster Than Previously Estimated
March 14 2008 / by Alvis Brigis
Category: Information Year: General Rating: 7
Enterprise solution company EMC has just released an update to their seminal Digital Universe paper in which they report a 10%+ revision of their 2007 numbers. The resizing comes comes to a grand total of 281 billion gigabytes, resulting from “faster growth in cameras, digital TV shipments, and better understanding of information replication.”
The company also confirms that, as they had predicted, “the amount of information created, captured, or replicated exceeded available storage for the first time in 2007” and that trends indicate “by 2011, almost half of the digital universe will not have a permanent home.” This is due to the expectation that there will be 10x the digital information as compared to 2006.
In short, information growth is still increasing at exponential
rate, step-in-step with technology
. To get a sense of this pace of this proliferation, take a look at
this useful ticker that EMC made
available to help diffuse their study:
Also of note, the paper claims that “approximately 70% of the digital universe is created by individuals, but enterprises are responsible for the security, privacy, reliability, and compliance of 85%.”
So what does it all mean? To me, it indicates that we have indeed entered the knee of a broader exponential growth curve composed of mutually reinforcing technology, information, communication and intelligence increases. (The jury is still out on comm and intelligence, but data could be coming in soon.) For EMC, this translates into new dollars – lots of them.
Their paper concludes: “We have many of the tools in place — from Web 2.0 technologies and terabyte drives to unstructured data search software and the Semantic Web — to tame the digital universe. Done right, we can turn information growth into economic growth.”
Could it be that the global economy is also poised to grow exponentially?
(via John Moravec at Education Futures)
Comment Thread (2 Responses)
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You are ignoring the fact that 99% of that “information” will be YouTube videos of people doing something stupid. Needless to say that “intelligence increase” thanks to these videos will be minimal. 0.1% of that data will be generated by LHC, it will be used for countless PhD papers, but at the end of the day will have no impact on technology whatsoever. Remaining 0.9% will of course be porn, and I, for one, am looking forward to any increase in that segment.
Posted by: johnfrink May 05, 2008
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@ johnfrink – 2 things: 1) I’m not so sure about the ongoing lack of utility of novelty data like YouTube. ie, Google is developing software that mines textual data (street signs, t-shirt text, etc.) from video. Such an app could dramatically increase the value of novelty info, albeit gradually. I’m betting others, like for example semantic / baby AI analyzers will be able to further tag that data in concert with facial recognition, time recognition, voice recognition, location regonition, etc. Then boom, pieces of the exploding data pool become more valuable, plus the whole data pool becomes more valuable because it can be recombined for a billion purposes. 2) As people see this occurring, they begin to realize what makes data more or less valuable and begin tweaking their input behavior in order to make more $ from new hits-based revenue programs for video, etc.
Both 1 and 2 are important for intelligence increase because they give us access to more pertinent, longitudinal social data, some new novel ideas, allow us to follow idea spread, x100, as well as changing our behavior to maximize info value to the system.
From this near future standpoint (say 3-7 years out, is my bet), YouTube and Google are undervalued properties. So buy some stock, write some comments that will be auto-mined later and assembled into a valuable simulation of the frink, and enjoy the ongoing explosion of porn (no argument there, think your % may be a bit low).
Posted by: Alvis Brigis May 16, 2008
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